Here’s . . . Kamala, almost fully feathered! / Photo by Stephanie Cavanaugh.
By Stephanie Cavanaugh
I HAVE elephant ears coming out of my ears. Sadly, the wrong sort.
Elephant ears are members of the arum or, to be fancier, araceae family, which includes about 4,000 varieties, including caladium, philodendron, and calla lily.
But generally what people, meaning me, call elephant ears are the plants that grow enormous leaves, typically dark green, that resemble in shape and size the ears of an elephant.
They arrive as bulbs (tubers) and can be stuck in any sort of reasonable soil with some degree of light, and given time will bolt out of the ground and start tossing off monster-scale leaves.
While there are plenty of instructions online for the best ways of growing them, the plants tend to ignore them and grow whenever they feel in the mood. This can be irritating.
This spring I tried to be particularly encouraging, putting a very large pot on the front porch, which gets more sun than anywhere in the garden, gave it some nice soil, stuck six or seven bulbs in the pot and settled myself down to wait.
Since one thing I do know is that they get off to a faster start in a pot, I figured this would give me a jump start on growth, moving them to the garden beds when they deigned to emerge.
Great idea! I thought.
Unfortunately, when they popped up and I tried to move them, the roots were impossibly tangled.
Giving it a try, I accidentally broke off the foliage from the one plant I managed to wrestle out of the bunch. Potting up the sad-looking, now bald, bulb, I put it in a pot in a corner of the back garden, where it sat and sulked, and continues to sit and sulk.
Meanwhile, the rest of the clump went into a single large hole, where it has grown quite large and flopped about so badly that the Prince tied it to the wall with some extremely unattractive string.
This is NOT the effect I was going for.
This is the effect LittleBird Stephanie was going for: Elephant ears on the left, monstera philodendron leaves on the right, plus some hydrangea, to make a moody mid-winter arrangement in the hallway of the Victorian Cavanaugh manse in Washington DC. / Photo by Stephanie Cavanaugh.
Worst of all, these were the wrong variety of elephant ears for my ultimate purpose, which was cutting the stems for a vase in the living room, where they would spread their fabulous leaves behind the sofa or in the front hall and, when spotlit from below, cast magnificent shadows on the night ceiling. In past years, the leaves would last for weeks of winter. (I’d keep the mother plants growing elsewhere in the house so I could clip more to refresh the display.)
These, when cut, look okay for a day, then go flumpsht, drooping listlessly over the sides of the vase.
What I had inadvertently bought were colocasia bulbs when what I wanted were alocasia. You might get either in a bag at a big-box store; they look awfully alike in the photo on the bag, with their enormous leaves and fabulous spread, and the bags don’t bother to identify the variety. They’re also usually cheap.
But the alocasia leaves grow horizontally, a flat surface looking at the sky. Colocasias face forward. If you’re just growing them in the garden, you might not notice or care. Both are fabulous and dramatic and so forth. But if you want to add them to display the leaves as I do, or add them to flower arrangements, only the alocasias will do.
Unless you have a greenhouse, or sunroom, don’t try to start bulbs now—in any case, many are sold out for the season. Next spring, I’d suggest letting your fingers tickle the computer keyboard. That’s what I intend to do. Here’s looking at you, Dutch Bulbs.
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Meanwhile, Kamala, my baby budgie, is almost out of her box. There’s a one-inch drop from the box to the cage floor that seems to be intimidating her. I was watching her yesterday, pulling her body over the opening, so her wings flapped in the air. Goldie, her dad, was sitting on a nearby branch watching her, just watching. Proud Papa, baby’s about to . . . and . . .
Mama Cooper, who was sitting on a top branch suddenly realizes what is happening, swoops down, and pushes Kam back into the box with a lot of squawking and feather flapping and accusatory stares at Goldie.
Damn, how familiar this is. Papa’s thinking, Go fly, my little star. Mama’s like, Not so fast buster, she’s still a baby.
Lived it